Maybe they felt that in order to justify any licensing fees it would have to be a big-budget, AAA game?

GTA 4 had a reputed cost of $100 million. With that as context, $25 doesn't seem ludicrous for a next gen or even current gen game.

Key thing for me here is the mention of the word 'risk'. Not that they felt $25 million was excessive, or wouldn't find a way to spend that amount of money, or even whether or not it would be a good game...but that the risk for return on investment was too high.

In the case of Dragon Age you pay the price for the better graphics with long loading times though.. and a memory leak that forces you to restart the game after 3-4 hours because load-times increase and increase.

I've never run into this problem...namely because the game crashes for me during every other cut scene.

As someone who's been in the industry for over 11 years, I've never been happy with being laid off. A few months of unemployment can set you back years in terms of finances.

Frankly, studio shut downs are a not a good thing for anyone. Most people I've worked with who were axed as part of a team or a project made a decent game and were primed to make a much better game. Never given the opportunity.

I blame the used game market. It's contributed to the death of so much potential at the expense of someone not even involved in making games getting huge profits. That's why I don't buy used games and it's why I stopped letting people borrow my games or borrowing games from other people. If I play it, I pay for it.

Gaming has been around for over 20 years now and it costs almost nothing to have resizable fonts and/or to make a game work with a zoom-in utility. These should be standard things. With screen resolutions going up to higher than I ever would have thought possible, some of the fonts on the games are too tiny for anyone with glasses to read, much less the visually impaired.

The guy may have made a stupid case for himself by saying that not being able to use the Sony marketplace is losing him money, but the point still stands. If gaming companies are made to comply so that all text is resizable then everybody wins.

It should be up to the company making the game to decide that. They're in the best position to know what the cost versus potential benefit would be.

This is not public property or access to a necessity we're talking about...this is entertainment produced by a private corporation. Government has no business messing with this.

Release date in 3-4 months...no open beta yet. This game is pretty much guaranteed to have a rough launch.

They're repeating the same mistake they made with Champions. Only this time, I doubt Atari will let them slip the date. They'd be stupid not to, but publishers can be very stupid when it comes to making necessary investments for a game...especially when the last one didn't pay off.

Don't buy into the marketting spin on this one...even though they've got Roper hocking it during every Champions interview now. Get into the open beta if you can and then wait at least a month or two after launch before thinking about investing in this game.

Frankly this game doesn't sound as interesting as KoTOR...it doesn't look as good as Black Prophecy, and it's going to have a hard time standing up against the venerable EVE. All it has going for it is the IP, and ST fans are notoriously hard to please.

I think 2 levels from one campaign is really not enough to judge the entire game on. Pretty sure there are some campaigns that take place at night, but daytime campaigns was one of the things that many players specifically asked for on their forums. For all I know, it could be dark by the end of "The Parish".

Another example of how trying to cater to some of your players will only succeed in disappointing others.

I don't get the 'dated' comment. I feel like the level of graphics is more than enough to be immersive and yet still run well on a wide band of people's systems. Every game that comes out doesn't need to push the bar so far back that only people with the most expensive card on the market can run it at 15fps.

Besides, I think we're getting pretty close to point at which engine technology is going to be able to render graphics that are simply 'good enough', and we'll finally start seeing more exploration into different styles, tone, and just solid art direction...after the tools catch up to the tech.

It's definitely a sequel, or possibly 1.5 version of the game. But that's mainly in regards to the gameplay renovations, the design behind some of the new specials (ideas that I saw pitched SO many times on their forums as needed classes to disrupt popular tactics)...but from the 2 levels in the French Quarter, it's lost a lot of it's flavor that the original captured so well.

I'm still looking forward to it's full release, especially to check out the new gameplay modes and play through the new campaigns...but I just don't have the same sort of attachment to the 4 new survivors. I would still recommend the original L4D for it's tone and mood (especially at the prices you can pick it up for now). The graphic improvements for L4D2 are not that drastic. They're there...they're noticeable (especially cubic environment maps)...but not to the degree that it makes playing the first one feel like you're playing a last gen game.

I'm still hoping that they'll tie the two games together somehow. I would love to be able to jump from L4D to L4D2 campaigns, use any of the 8 survivors, melee weapons, new gameplay modes, etc. I realize there's a huge void of assets to make that feasible...voice-overs for the original survivors for the new campaigns and survivors for one...but it would be awesome for those who have both games.

Already bought L4D2, and I really don't care if they never release a DLC. I've almost gotten my money's worth from the 2 level demo alone, so looking forward to the various campaigns and game modes to play with at release.

Still haven't played Crash Course in L4D, or even survivor mode for that matter...but I still felt I got more than my money's worth out of that game.

Valve's making money, I'm having a blast, who's the real loser in this deal?

Fion the everlasting AoC fanboi... I cant wait to laugh in you face when the game shuts down in 6 months or so.

Exactly how long will you give him? Betting on an MMO shutting down is like betting on someone's pet hamster dying, it's inevitable. Nothing lasts forever and MMO games are no exception. You don't come off sounding wise and street savy making statements like that.

How long before your prediction loses it's relevance, and you admit to Fion that you were wrong and that AOC was not a flash in the pan and instead a succesful game. Because there's more to success than trumping WoW's obscene number of subscribers...that's not a requirement.

Only fair. If you're predicting 6 months, then 6 months from if the game is still runing now come back and admit that you were a twit.